Last Friday my company organised their yearly festival. As for tradition, there are several awards to celebrate the people and teams. I was honoured to be nominated for the Inspiring Leader Award. I did not win, but I got a special mention! Even if I had a speech, I was happy to skip the part of walking on the stage and talking to the public. Don’t get me wrong, I like winning! But I am also introverted.
What matters, is learning that the people I work with appreciate what I do.
Personal & Well Being
The power of introverts ( watch the video )
This is a powerful speech about introverts. According to Carl Jung ( inventor of the theory ), nobody is an introvert or extrovert. It is a spectrum.
Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation.
Extroverts crave large amounts of stimulation.
Introverts feel at their best when they're in quieter, more low-key environments.
Susan Cain walks us through her own experience. She grew up with the bias that everyone needs to adapt and be more outgoing. She even took a career in law to prove herself she could be more assertive.
At the heart of the talk is not elevating a personality trait over the other. It is more about recognising how our modern culture incentivises more extrovert behaviour.
Group activities are preferred to solitude and deep work. Those activities are where introverts normally thrive.
We need to find a good balance to enable creativity while keeping collaboration.
We do need both extroverts and introverts. Susan loves extroverts and she recognises how important is their role in society. Furthermore, each of us has a bit of both traits, so it is not black and white…
The key to maximizing our talents is to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us.
Another great insight is how introverts can enable teams. If a team is proactive, introverts normally achieve better results. This is because they enable their teams.
A research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders deliver better outcomes than extroverts do.
When they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas.
An extrovert can, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface.
A final point is for group dynamics. We need to find ways to make our discussions inclusive. Otherwise, we may only hear a smaller % of our team.
Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics. Then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there.
People and Teams
Introverted Leadership: How To Thrive As A Leader Even If You're An Introvert ( Read more )
Each personality trait has its advantages and disadvantages. As an introverted leader, this article covers well how to leverage your strengths. As well as recognising common weaknesses and how to overcome them.
This is important because introverts tend to struggle to go beyond middle management.
In a UC Berkeley study, researchers discovered that people tend to hire and promote those with extroverted personality traits (assertive, forceful, and self-assured) to leadership roles.
Introverted leaders are great listeners.
They develop better connections due to their capacity for listening and empathy.
Introverts don’t mind sharing the spotlight (or giving it completely away 😃).
A key factor is to have proactive teams. As we learnt, introverts thrive in this environment, while struggling with passive teams.
Creating a psychologically safe environment can lead your team to voice their ideas and make mistakes. This way you can get more proactive teams.
To break down the suggestions are:
Embrace a positive mindset
Develop your unique introverted leadership style
Build proactive teams by:
Listening more
Creating a safe space for your team to innovate
Team memory, organisational sharing and serendipity in distributed workplaces ( Read more )
Since COVID-19 most of the workplaces had to try a new way of working. Many companies are still in that space. They either work more at home than in the office or they have distributed offices. The main challenge is how you train the memory muscle. Short-term and Long-term memory is key for a team to feel accomplished and learn from their projects. If you manage distributed teams this article is for you. The main 2 concepts I love are:
Principle for sharing information
Go to where people are
Little and often
Repetition, repetition, repetition
Maintaining and reinforcing the team’s memory
Especially the long-term memory was an interesting one for me.
Long-term memory includes how your team got to where they are, from inception to now, what decisions helped along the way, how the team membership changes over time, and team wins and celebrations. Use these to help stay on target, when new people join the team, new stakeholders appear, and as a way to remind yourselves of how far you’ve come.
Project stories are definitely a way to enhance that long-term memory goal.
All these concepts are important to make sure you keep your team motivated while understanding the decisions we make day by day.
Technology and Delivery
Ageing Code ( Read more )
This article reminds us of the importance of not following shallow trends. Innovation is important. Yet sticking to technologies that you know well and that you understand trade-offs is better. There will be a new framework and a new relevant technology emerging from time to time. Before making that big step of adoption and replacing the old one. Ask yourself a few questions:
What are the goals that you’re trying to achieve? Are they substantial enough?
Do these new additions conform to your overall architecture?
Do they fit your development paradigms?
Will you have to go out of your way to integrate it? Will others?
Are you sure this module needs to be optimized/improved/rewritten or is it just your ego talking?
Interestingly enough this comes while I was reading this also. Bun appears to be 90% faster than Node. But a wise comment about this is:
Bun has no such constraint. It begins with a clean state, and can ship something that works for, say, 90% of existing Node projects, and break the remaining 10%. This means it can make decisions which greatly improve performance, which Node doesn’t have the luxury of doing.
If you got here and you liked the content please like and share it. If you have any thoughts and want to let me know, please comment. I would love to learn more from you ❤️